Chapter 16: Woman Unleashed, Fury Unbound

16

Pickle-Me-Jack held on as best he could but he was being drawn further and further into the swirling storm of flames. He tried to pull himself back, but the threads he'd woven held him fast. He was no longer in control of Monie's story.

His prey had transformed within the cacooning of his weaving. She now wielded a mystically honed dagger and sliced easily through his bindings. With a deft maneuver, she twisted herself round and dropped lithely to the floor.

In the same rapid, fluid motion, she sheathed her blade, retrieved the stout bow from around her shoulder, nocked a bolt of lightning and pinned Pickle-Me-Jack to the wall.

“I told you to leave us the fuck alone!” she roars.

This was a different woman. Different even than the one who'd stood not long before at the the top of a small hill, having just ripped open a dimensional portal. That woman had acted out of a desperate maternal instinct. Lashing out, unfocused, reflexively.

Monie had only ever been able to summon the strength to venture into the Incata when her mind had become too tormented by the fractious damage done to her by the Queen Mother. In those moments, when she was free of the muffling clutches of the psychotropics that she was involuntarily forced to swallow, she could escape within herself. She could escape within the Incata.

That woman had been but a shading of what stood here now, within Jack's seat of power.

Pickle-Me-Jack, in his hubris, had failed to recognize that his weavings and workings, detangling the mysteries which plagued Monie's mind, prepping her memories to devour, had actually served to free her of her occluding enchantments.

She could see clearly for the first time in more than ten years. Her memories were once again solely her own, unified within her mind.

What she could see most clearly in the moment was a monster. A vile molester. This thing, this insect of a man who now squirmed piteously against the arrow piercing its chest, had violated her. It had left its disgusting scent on her. She could still feel remnants of its evil spore shriveling away in her mind as it died, the severed threadings falling away.

Monique Felani was pissed.

“I'll peel that nasty skin from your bones, you dirty old man,”

Pickle-Me-Jack squirmed and hissed, “You bitch!”

Monique loosed another arrow. It thunked into his chest alongside the first. “Don't call me that. Where's my son?”

Jack's skin began to shift, he began to contort into his true form. He shed his human shell like a split and molted carapace.

“You fucking bitch!” the thing hisses once more. “You dare strike me here? In my own nafasi madaraka, my place of power? You are nothing to me, I who have survived the nothingness. Who was birthed in nothingness and crawled up from it. I will wipe your mind, suck you dry!”

Monique Felani shows no concern for Pickle-Me-Jack's threats. She casually scans the interior of the room and realizes that an enchantment was at work, that the room was cloaked in illusion. This was nothing more than an animal's den. Jack had worked a weaving, similar to the working used to mask his true form. The interior of a charmingly cluttered, or filthy, depending on one's bent, hermit's hovel hid its true nature.

“I smell your fear, old man. I know your kind, no matter what body you wear,” she says and looses another lightning arrow, this one finding it's home in Jack's right eye.

He roars in pain and charges. He'd morphed into an unnatural amalgam of man and spider, it's human head split open into grotesquely snapping mandibles, and he scrabbled forward on a strange array of jointed legs, malformed human arms, hands and feet.

Monique Felani easily ducks beneath the gruesome beast's swiping, slashing, pincers. Pickle-Me-Jack crashes into the far wall. His bulk is hard to maneuver in this small space and she takes advantage of it, pulling her sword from its scabbard, she slices at the demon's underbelly, ripping wide a huge gash as she rolls underneath and away from his attack.

Jack screams again in rage and pain and jabs out with a branch thick spider's leg, its razor sharp talon stabbing into Monique Felani's thigh. She chops at the leg, severing it. Pulling the talon out with a grimace, she turns the attack on Jack as her sword bursts into flame.

Fending off his battering limbs, she pushes in towards the heart of the beast, her sword tip lancing again into its exposed underbelly, this time driven deep, hissing as his blood extinguishes the fire.

Pickle-Me-Jack wraps her in a chest cracking bear hug and pulls her closer, its slavering jaws snapping open and shut, meaning to rip out her throat.

Outside, Jo-Mel listens to the sounds of the struggle coming from within the ragged hole in the middle of the forest. The woman would stand no chance against whatever it was behind this massive working. Surely these were the sounds of Monie and Bealz's last moments.

Jo-Mel, blade drawn and at the ready, dips inside Pickle-Me-Jack's lair, prepared for the darkness, though unprepared for what transpired inside.

Two monstrous life energies were locked in combat. Their forms writhed and swirled through both the physical and the astral planes. Monique Felani had become a raging storm. She was a towering electromagnetic storm cloud shot through with fire and lightning. Pickle-Me-Jack loomed over and around her, himself a demonically insubstantial, protoplasmic spider pulsing with power.

Their amorphous forms twisted and danced about each other, a maddening display of unearthly forces.

Jo-Mel was thunderstruck. It was near impossible to believe that this was the uncertain, timid little thing left over from the fires which brought them here. Monie had lit up the horizon with their arrival, but had quickly dwindled away most unimpressively. What Jo-Mel now witnessed, as it raged and roiled, was the pure, unchecked fury of a mother's protective fires gone nuclear.

Monique Felani was channeling an unprecedented amount of magical energies, and Jo-Mel was further astonished to see that she had somehow drawn on the very life essence of the forest itself. It was actively lending her its strength. Jo-Mel could see the ley-lines shifted beneath her, sparkling, twinkling brightly as the power flowed into her.

When Monique had looked around the demon's dim rooms, she'd seen through the veil of his illusions and could see the true purpose of its workings. Pickle-Me-Jack had bound the Elemental which resided in this forest, which was this forest. He had encased it beneath layer upon layer of his weavings, finally subduing and feeding on its near infinite psychic impressions. The energy was turned back on the forest, killing it slowly from within.

She had responded to the Elementals mournful cries of pain and desperation. The Elemental had responded to her in kind, adding its own energies and efforts to hers when it sensed Monique Felani's hatred for Jack and her concern for, not just her son, but the consciousness that she felt trapped here.

As the struggle waged on, Monique Felani began to beat back at Pickle-Me-Jack's slippery form, she began to surround him, to smother him, squeezing, pressing him back down into the form of the little old man they'd first encountered.

The fury of the storm intensified and the air trembled as the Shuju'ua Vri wrested the living heart of the forest away from Pickle-Me-Jack's vile weavings, ripping asunder the powerful workings that had grown firmly in place with a thunderous shockwave.

A large ring of trees, some of which had stood tall and proud for millenia, was felled, flattened by the bow front. They were already weakened, poisoned and weighted down by the dense weavings and webbings that Pickle-Me-Jack had heavily strung throughout.

“Please, o great warrior! Your mercy!” the old man mewls.

Monique Felani double fists the hilt of her broadsword, spins, extends and slices the demon's head clean off of its shoulders.

Throwing the smoldering blade to the ground at her feet, she whips her bow back into position with another of her wickedly electric arrows at the ready, pivots in a blur and fires at Jo-Mel's head.